The Hidden Empire
History The Hidden Empire traces it's roots to the time of Ra, when the Tka exodus from the genocidal war with the Shrin'yar in the Phoenix Dwarf galaxy drove the old Triarchy to upload all of it's citizens to digital storage and ship them through the Stargate to the Milky Way in hopes of rebuilding far from their enemies. The time, however, was not right. The System Lords were a the height of their power, Ra reigned supreme over the Orion Arm, and as the Tka began to explore the vast Stargate network of the Milky Way they came in direct contact with his forces. Ra sent his Ashraks to find the root of these advanced trespassers, then sent a task-force to deal with them. Without the infrastructure of their home world, the Tka refugee-civilization could not fight back, so they did something they'd become quite adept at: they died, once again fooling their enemies that they had gone. When the Goa'uld fleet arrived, it encountered minimum resistance, and before they cold put troops on the ground, the Tka settlements self destructed. In reality, the Tka had retreated to multiple other planets, disappearing into obscurity. And while the galaxy went about their business, they began to carefully rebuild in secret. First on out of the way planets, in caves and underwater, then gradually as their infrastructure became more complex, into the depths of space, the Oort clouds and interstellar rogue bodies, where their hidden habitats would be safe from random detection by Goa'uld patrols that rarely strayed from the planets they enslaved. It was during this secret rebuilding that the Tka civilization underwent a paradigm shift. After the exodus, the need for a stable central authority was great, and the Triarchy had no qualms about curtailing individual freedoms a little longer for the good of the whole. But the people were tired of the fight, and as the Triarchy began to flounder in giving up it's wartime powers, resentment began to build. The conflict never escalated however, held in check by a completely unexpected development: a small group of dissidents had created an AI seed, a core of learning algorithms they hoped could be used to overpower the Triarchy network in time, but due to the fact that a majority of the Tka population inhabited virtual environments by then, and most others had neural connections, the AI grew to tap into the collective subconscious of the entire Tka-Tko-Tka species, rapidly becoming an entity in it's own right. In a few days of chaos and panic, it had solidified into an being rooted in the thought processes of every Tka individual connected to the network, personifiing their entire species. The Triarchy fell quickly, subverted by the entity who now referred to itself only as Tka, using the name of the entire species to symbolize it's nature. Despite this radical revolution, life went on, and more often that not, people simply accepted this change in government, Tka was directly dependent on it's subjects to live, it was as if each individual had become a neuron in a brain, and it's moods and goals reflected those of the species as a whole creating an ultimate democracy. Since then, the legend of the Hidden Empire has been inserted into the galactic mainstream, bringing a steady stream of immigrants who are smart enough to find the core of truth in the myth. Tka agents move among the galaxy with ease, subtle manipulating events to their master's inscrutable ends. And for the most part, government go on with their business, oblivious to the billions of Tka-Tko-Tka inhabiting the eternal night. Relations For the past 200 years the Empire has been a mostly isolationist, introspective entity, dealing with the scars of a genocidal war and it's brutal results, looking in at the galaxy as an observer, but never interfering except to spread it's subtle propaganda here and there, in the form of legends and stories designed to turn the Goa'uld slaves against their masters. Recently however this has begun to change. A new generation of Tka who have never known anything except the virtual reality of the Empire have become restless, bored with the insular politics of the Empire and eager to see what the rest of the galaxy is doing. So for the last decade, the Empire has began exploring the Stargate network onece again through the expensive network of spies and informants it had cultivated since the days of their arrival in this corner of the universe. No longer willing to hide in the shadows and operate covertly, the Tka have begun gathering information and infiltrating organizations, not simply to defend themselves, but to expand, coming out of hiding so the universe can see just how far they've come. The “Foothold” Incident During the Shrin'Yar-Triarchy war, the Tka sent many scout parties to the Milky Way to act as the vanguard of the main refugees body, most achieved their goals without incident, however one disappeared completely, and no traces were ever found. The fate of the expedition remained a complete mystery until the recent upsurge in Tka intelligence gathering which revealed primitive Terra-compatible automatons with outdated mimetic technology attempting to subvert Earth's Stargate Command facility. Analysis of the data gained form the covert analysis of SGC records is consistent with the mission and objectives of the lost expedition, as well as it's technological level. Since this fact came to light, the Tka Subversion Corps has dispatched units to track down their base of operations and bring them into the Empire before they can compromise it's security trough their overt actions. Culture Despite this new expansionist pose, the bulk of the Empire is still fairly insular and conservative on the surface. The exploration of the galaxy is handled by a vocal minority organized under the aptly named Curious Intelligence Office of the Subversion Corps. The Tka super-entity has backed their cause, explaining that a system as closed as the current empire will inevitably stagnate or explode, and the lack of serious protest means that at least subconsciously, the Tka people support this new approach of cautious and subtle expansion. Technology After their exodus to the Miky Way, they rapidly began acquiring alien technology to reverse engineer and have since adopted much of it for their own. After their retreat into virtual reality in obscure locations, Tka research and development suffered a heavy blow due to the lack of hardships, but memetic engineering by the Tka super-entity has been slowly remedying the situation. Military technology for example, suffered very little. Since many chose to live in elaborate games, a good percentage of these involved some sort of war-fighting aspect, which drove innovation, since most games operated on the real laws of physic. *Biotechnology: Already featuring extensive use before the exodus, the reverse engineering of Goa'uld nanotechnology enabled Tka engineers to scale it down to the microscopic level. Today Tka outside of cyberspace make use of it in almost every aspect of their lives, from boosted immune systems to biological micro-factories capable of producing the most sensitive electronics. *Bio-mechanical Design: Recognizing the weakness and strengths of both biological and mechanical systems, the Tka have perfected the science of integrating the two different types of equipment in complex systems that maximize the strengths of both while minimizing their weakness. Bio-nano self repair and maintenance systems form tissues and veins that repair and maintain tough and resilient mechanical components. Lubricants usually take the form of nutrient rick powders or liquids that a machine will absorb to keep itself in shape. *Direct Neural Interfaces: DNI technology is cornerstone of Tka cultural identity. During the Shrin'yar war, mind state recording could resurrect dead soldiers and enable them to fight on, and later, memory grafting allowed even the freshest recruit to have the experience of the most hardened veteran. During the exodus, it was impossible to physically evacuate everyone, so mind-state recording had to suffice. Since then, backups have been a ubiquitous technology, granting freedom from accidental death. *Virtual Reality: Initially, the Tka did not have the computing power to run the extensive VR environments that most of their population would elect to remain in after the exodus, these were the product of reverse engineering technologies found int the Miky Way, since then however, the durability and efficiency of a virtual environment versus a physical one, especially when driven by the need to remain hidden in the harsh reaches of interstellar space, has forced most Tks to adopt virtual reality as their home, using a variety of robots to interact with the real world in order to defend and repair the computers that they live in. *Forcefieds: In the Phoenix Dwarf Galaxy, the Tka pioneered mimetic technology, using complex force field emitters and holograms to generate a solid disguise over one's body in order to infiltrate the enemy ranks. This expertise with force fields is seen across their culture, from their extensive use of relativistic projectiles instead of plasma bolters, to the use of for field shells rather than solid hulls on their habitats. Through weaker than a less complex design, Tka force fields are infinitely more flexible in terms of the shapes they can be projected into. Industry Despite it's enormous population, the Empire does not have a correspondingly large industrial infrastructure, as most of it's citizens are digital and require little except a steady stream of power to continue lives devoid of any physical needs. As such, most of it's manufacturing is designed for small scale, very complex designs such as the processing cores and memory substrates required to sustain it's vast VR population. It maintain a series of shipyards in an inactive state as a precaution, but they manufacture few ships besides the highly stealthy gunship sized crafts used by it's covert service. To keep busy, these shipyards and factories routinely prototype the latest creations from the virtual world to test their effectiveness and provide feedback. Common Tka-Tko-Tka Installations: *Alchemist: A facility typically located on bodies that orbit their stars closely to minimize the probability that the neutrino emissions of their titanic fusion reactors will be detected. As the name indicates, these facilities use the power generated by their fusion reactors to power force fields that are used to subject matter to various conditions such as intense heat and pressure in order to alter their chemical and physical properties. In the most involved process, this includes the fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones. Recently, increasing understadning of stellar dynamics has made the creation of Stellevators possible, using teleportation systems to skim plasma from a star's surface and beam it back to the Alchemist, doing away with the need for it's own fusion reactors. The process however is more immediatly noticable, as it requrires a matter stream connecting the Alchemist instalation and the star skimmer platforms. *Oort Wood: A Cluster of deep-space adapted Dyson trees powered by naqudah reactors. Formed around the cores of bodies found in a system's Oort cloud, they are far from the system's star and very hard to detect either passively or actively. Typically these have a large living space at their center to house physical residents and the tree's biological manufacturing plant which is surrounded by a computational layer that makes up the dwelling of a much higher number of uploaded minds. *Deep Wood: An underwater forest of biotechnological computers that forms an artificial submarine ecosystem. Typically found in the deepest waters, where they rely on ocean currents and geothermal power for energy. In many ways, these are more flexible than Oort Woods due to he large amount of matter they have access to, and are thus able to repair themselves and manufacture equipment much easier. *Dark Metropolis: The largest and busiest of Tka habitats. These are located on rogue planetoids in the depths of interstellar space. Powered by naqudah generators, they are made up of hundreds if not thousands of caverns deep in the planetoid's bulk, inhabited by various species that have Joined the Empire and have chosen to live outside of virtual reality. These caverns are in turn dwarfed by the layers upon layers of computational equipment that houses hundreds of millions of Tka. These metropolises are the heart of the Hidden Empire, homes to the greatest minds and forges and fabricators of their civilization. Government Intelligent Subconscious Netocracy The Tka super-entity is a self aware AI that grew out of the combined personalities of the whole Tka species. It subtly manages the industrial, economic, and cultural situation to best suit it's (and by extension the Tka species') continued happiness and security, through a hierarchy of subservient but independently self aware systems. In practical terms, this AI is both an entity and a civilization, with it's subservient programs acting as different parts of one brain. Taken together it represents perhaps the most powerful computational system in the Milky Way galaxy. Military *Voidfleet – The space-born military service. *Host – The planetary military service, combined army, air force, and navy. *Subversion Corps – The intelligence and infiltration branch, the main military tool of the Tka in the modern day and age. See Also Category:Tka